Jean Mensa
The Electoral Commission’s (EC’s) two-day mop-up exercise recorded 30,814 voters, bringing the total provisional current voter population at the end of the registration exercise to 16,963,306, with women making up 51.73% of the figure and men 48.27%.
In absolute terms, 8,775,609 women and 8,187,698 men provisionally registered at the end of the whole registration exercise on Sunday, August 9, subject to the removal of names of foreigners and minors who managed to beat the system and registered.
First-time voters aged 18 and 19 at the end of the exercise were 762,944 and 612,104 respectively, bringing the total to 1,375,048 representing 8.1% of the voter population.
The Chairperson of the EC, Jean Mensa, who made this known yesterday in Accra as part of the commission’s “Let The Citizen Know” briefings, said the EC would use established mechanisms to meticulously remove all names of unqualified voters from the register since the 2020 general election and future elections in the country would have to be a ‘wholly-owned Ghanaian enterprise’.
She said for the first time, the EC was able to make special arrangements for the vulnerable in the society, that is, the aged, pregnant women, and citizens with various disabilities to register without any hindrance, resulting in a total number of 64,996 being registered, thereby making the registration exercise more participatory and inclusive.
According to her, the whole registration exercise was hugely successful despite the fact that the whole country had to contend with the Covid-19 pandemic which threw everything out of gear, including the calendar of the EC.
She explained that the pandemic impacted severely on the timely delivery of the EC’s Biometric Voter Registration Kits (BVRs) and Biometric Verification Devices (BVDs) which forced the commission to change the registration date from April to July, stressing that the phenomenal exhibition of cooperation by Ghanaians made the whole exercise very successful.
She said Ghanaians also cooperated very well in the midst of the pandemic and observed all the necessary Covid-19 health protocols to ensure that nobody died from the disease at the end of the exercise.
“The efficiency and professionalism of our field staff coupled with the robustness of the registration kits also contributed to the high number of registrants during the exercise,” she pointed out.
According to her, the EC recorded 150 registrants per kit per day as compared to previous registrations where we averaged some 80 persons per kit per day, adding that in some cases field staff recorded up to 280 persons per kit per day.
She noted that out of the over 16 million persons who registered at the end of the exercise, 60.09% of citizens used the Ghana Card, 37.99% registered through the Guarantor System, and 1.92% registered with their passports.
According to the EC chairperson, a total number of 61,995 applicants who presented themselves for registration had lost their fingerprints and would be identified facially using the in-built facial recognition software during verification when it is time to vote.
She said at the end of the registration, challenge cases stood at 37,762, with the Oti Region recording the highest followed by the Ahafo and Volta regions.
She said at the end of the entire registration exercise, the Greater Accra Region recorded the highest of 3,509,805 voters, followed by Ashanti with 3,013,856, and Eastern Region with 1,628,180.
The Central Region comes next with 1,566,061 followed by Western Region with 1,185,315, Northern Region with 1,047,539, Volta Region with 929,322, Upper East Region with 653,730, Bono Region with 648,408, Bono East Region with 592,015, and followed by the Upper West Region with 470,271.
The Western North Region comes next with 465,444, followed by Oti Region with 353,492, Ahafo Region with 315,827, Savannah Region with 295,648, with the North East Region recording 288,393.
By Thomas Fosu Jnr